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BTW, SMZ/RMZ's are a friggen joke, just like the ESA.

You're right...most of this stuff is a joke. Most of it is well meant but poorly thought out. And poorly executed, too. Remember when we were absolutely forbidden to leave logs in the creeks and rivers? I spent a lot of time and money retrieving logs that went astray.
Now they're intentionally placing logs in waterways. And, once again, a lot of time and money is being spent. Some of the money, indirectly, comes from me.

It's a joke, alright. I'll probably laugh about it...someday.
 
You're right...most of this stuff is a joke. Most of it is well meant but poorly thought out. And poorly executed, too. Remember when we were absolutely forbidden to leave logs in the creeks and rivers? I spent a lot of time and money retrieving logs that went astray.
Now they're intentionally placing logs in waterways. And, once again, a lot of time and money is being spent. Some of the money, indirectly, comes from me.

It's a joke, alright. I'll probably laugh about it...someday.

Oh I remember Bob. . . Logs? I remember hand picking pine bows in SMZ's because they were 'acidic', and could hurt fish 40 miles away. Hours of wasted money and time.

I also remember wading out (chest deep) into a bog of eternal stench to hook a Pondy that wouldn't come out'a the muck in one piece. . . Had to get 'special permission' to leave all the broken limbs and needles in there. More wasted time and money.
 
Oh I remember Bob. . . Logs? I remember hand picking pine bows in SMZ's because they were 'acidic', and could hurt fish 40 miles away. Hours of wasted money and time.

I also remember wading out (chest deep) into a bog of eternal stench to hook a Pondy that wouldn't come out'a the muck in one piece. . . Had to get 'special permission' to leave all the broken limbs and needles in there. More wasted time and money.

The upside, stroking the ego of the "God complexed" higher ups made nature okay.

Good thing they play God for us dimwits!
 
Yup...things have changed. Again. And, as usual, the responsibility for compliance falls to the guy in the brush. LOLOL...the last little run-in I had with Fins and Feathers concerning logs in a creek resulted from my offer to just leave some old snags where they were...in the creek. I'd bumped a couple with falling trees and that's where they wound up.

The 'ologists were horrified. Those weren't the type of logs they were looking for, the sizes was all wrong, they weren't placed according to their directions and diagrams, and they weren't properly installed by an approved contractor with the proper training and permits. I took the snags out of the creek.
 
Yup...things have changed. Again. And, as usual, the responsibility for compliance falls to the guy in the brush. LOLOL...the last little run-in I had with Fins and Feathers concerning logs in a creek resulted from my offer to just leave some old snags where they were...in the creek. I'd bumped a couple with falling trees and that's where they wound up.

The 'ologists were horrified. Those weren't the type of logs they were looking for, the sizes was all wrong, they weren't placed according to their directions and diagrams, and they weren't properly installed by an approved contractor with the proper training and permits. I took the snags out of the creek.

Makes a guy want to smack his forehead and walk away.
 
WRONG!!!

You trip the head FOOL in charge "HFIC" and help him back to his feet!

Then kick him where "the boys SHOULD be" and ask him if he has a permit to be in pain!

Back to my soap box!

:hmm3grin2orange::hmm3grin2orange:
 
If you were truly interested in reducing silt

An ironic icing to this cake is that we actually need to INCREASE silt... just not where we're talking about. Fact: the Pacific coast of Washington between Leadbetter Point and Grayland has for over 30 years seen the highest sustained erosion rate on the North American continent. This description of Washaway Beach is broad but missing one key element -- where does the sand to rebuild dunes come from? It always comes from river drainages upstream relative to prevailing currents.

In this case, that means the Columbia. As it happens, the greater Columbia watershed extends north and east into Montana, Utah, Alberta, BC and south into Oregon. That's a lot of land to drain, and on the many tributaries of this huge watershed, there are over 200 dams. Each dam withholds sediment which would eventually make its way downstream to be deposited in the great alluvial flat at the mouth of the Columbia, where it would be picked up by tidal currents and moved north to build dunes. Dunes are fragile and transient structures held together by little more than hardy grass and surface tension; new ones are very commonly destroyed by storms in the winter. Older dunes stabilize and become dry land. In the absence of sediment to rebuild after winter storms, only erosion is possible. Today, the sediment accumulation at the mouth of the Columbia has been estimated to be around 30% of what it was 120 years ago, the loss due entirely to dams.

There's also a locally-popular story about the Army Corps of engineers dredging the mouth of the Willapa in the 30's and the 40's, changing the hydraulic properties of the coastline thereabouts. This is undoubtedly a contributing factor in the erosion rate, but the lack of sediment is a longer and more potent driver.

Humptulips -- again, as a forestry tech, I wouldn't be too concerned about a few trees I can't cut, because in my mind, I'm in it for the long haul. There will be another sale. We'll get those trees later. That is, of course, if they don't blow down, in which case I'm 100% with you on stupid regulation regarding salvaging that which gravity so graciously provides us.
 
Great articles, dead on!

Too much government of any kind is bad, too much of the tree huggers BS destroys all of the forest. By feel good means the beatles are well fed while all of our renewable resources go to spoils instead of it's wise use.

I don't have much respect or use for the overly aggressive tactics of the ForUS Circus.
Most regulation is written in an office on the east coast, then the round peg is forced into the deserts triangle problems. No account for local uniqueness.

Big government is destroying all that is right with America.

Forests and public lands should be managed at state and or local levels.

Feds should stay out of it.

Kevin

So, you're saying that the Feds should stay out of managing federal land, if I read you right? May I shout out "hell no" to that?

I'd suspect that a big government would be appropriate for 300+ MILLION population and the land they're living on. But then your idea of "big" might differ from mine. For some it seems to be anything greater than zero involving their area of interest is too big.

Too little government wrt the banking/securities industries got us into our global economic spit-pile. Given the choice of too-big/too-little and the consequences, I'd lean toward too-big. Not paranoid here.

Let's stop chanting Murdoch's mantras; they do US no good.

Politics is the art of compromise. Some wise man said that.
 
Yup...things have changed. Again. And, as usual, the responsibility for compliance falls to the guy in the brush. LOLOL...the last little run-in I had with Fins and Feathers concerning logs in a creek resulted from my offer to just leave some old snags where they were...in the creek. I'd bumped a couple with falling trees and that's where they wound up.

The 'ologists were horrified. Those weren't the type of logs they were looking for, the sizes was all wrong, they weren't placed according to their directions and diagrams, and they weren't properly installed by an approved contractor with the proper training and permits. I took the snags out of the creek.

And then they wash away in heavy rains.

I bet their little book doesn't explain that, thus leaving them at the head scratching stage.
 
Given the choice of too-big/too-little and the consequences, I'd lean toward too-big. Not paranoid here.

Corruptions or failures in big organizations -- and that doesn't matter whether it's the government, business, or any other organization -- have greater negative consequences.

We also know all organizations are imperfect, it takes a lot of time and ethics to keep them from becoming selfish.

The Wall Street situation wasn't simply a failure of big government, it was also that too big businesses had been allowed to exist. Relaxing business regulations at a time we simultaneously relaxed anti-trust enforcement AND consolidated oversight in fewer agencies is a bad combination.

You're better off placing many small bets, accepting many small losses and many small gains, then one big bet on the assumption that you know all the possibilities and can make a statistically valid decision. Nicolas Talib's book Black Swan is a great one on this topic -- debunking the idea of the bell curve and trying to manage most things using conventional statistical methods.

So you're better off having many smaller businesses, and multiple layers of regulation (hey Federalism, what a concept!)

As it applies here, you're better off pushing as much decision making -- along with the research and broad policies to help guide them -- down to the lowest practical level, such as a ranger district or maybe the whatever level is above them.

You still provide oversight through audits and observation to make sure there isn't malicious or simply too greedy activities.

What will happen when you devolve decision making to smaller units is you will have more failures, but those failures will be contained and relatively small impact. It also gives you the ability to point to districts that things are functioning well and go, "That's what we should be trying to be like!"

When you consolidate decision making to bigger units in government you may nominally have fewer "failures" but when you do they're doozies and have great negative impact due to their size. And you lose the ability to compare the performance of A to B and figure out which is the better way to do things.
 
So, you're saying that the Feds should stay out of managing federal land, if I read you right? May I shout out "hell no" to that?

I'd suspect that a big government would be appropriate for 300+ MILLION population and the land they're living on. But then your idea of "big" might differ from mine. For some it seems to be anything greater than zero involving their area of interest is too big.

Too little government wrt the banking/securities industries got us into our global economic spit-pile. Given the choice of too-big/too-little and the consequences, I'd lean toward too-big. Not paranoid here.

Let's stop chanting Murdoch's mantras; they do US no good.

Politics is the art of compromise. Some wise man said that.

Everyone's opinion is welcome here, some of ours are just a little different when you live and work in the West. Little bit different world.
 
I did mind having to take away volume from a laid out but not sold sale. We had targets/quotas to meet and the purchasers also did a bit of planning on those targets. When volume was subtracted from a sale, we had to find more somewhere else, or lose funding and then find other places to live and work.

Now, the last NEPA meeting I attended, had silt fence required around all landings.

Silt is the current crisis, I guess. There was a crisis about water in the ditchline being muddy on a nearby district. I told folks it doesn't matter what color the water in the ditchline is, it is what color it is when it flows into a creek.

Usually, it clears up because most pipes do not empty into creeks. Roads were designed correctly and the runoff filters through the vegetation.

There was a big ruckus in the early 1980s on the Mapleton District which shut the timber program down for quite a while. I believe the crisis was muddy water/silt...I'll try to look it up. The Siuslaw Forest ended up paving a lot of their haul roads because of that.

We can't afford to do that now.
 
I may be mistaken. The shut down was because of landslides "triggered by timber harvest."

They could afford paving, as did this area, because there was so much value in the big timber that was hauled down those roads. The trouble is, now we can't afford to maintain the paving, or make repairs.
 
I can think of only one local logging road that was paved, and it was years ago. AFAIK, the state keeps it up, and they don't do too bad a job. They just repaved and did a bunch of culverts last summer.

Sure makes it nice to drive up for hunting and firewood get'n.
 
I can think of only one local logging road that was paved, and it was years ago. AFAIK, the state keeps it up, and they don't do too bad a job. They just repaved and did a bunch of culverts last summer.

Sure makes it nice to drive up for hunting and firewood get'n.

We have one, that I had to go up and down frequently for 3 years. Following a loaded log truck made you wonder about the sanity of the drivers. There are numerous places where the pavement is sinking, and failing on the outside of the road. The trucks sway and tip.

The good thing is, the road is so bad, they can't get up the speed like they used to on it. When a coworker complained about the speeding trucks on that road, I knew he was stretching the truth. :msp_thumbup:
 
We have one, that I had to go up and down frequently for 3 years. Following a loaded log truck made you wonder about the sanity of the drivers. There are numerous places where the pavement is sinking, and failing on the outside of the road. The trucks sway and tip.

The good thing is, the road is so bad, they can't get up the speed like they used to on it. When a coworker complained about the speeding trucks on that road, I knew he was stretching the truth. :msp_thumbup:

Ours was like that until last year, now it's pretty nice. I think they throw money at it every 20 years or so.
 
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